The Last Graduate begins to interrogate that assumption in a way that moves toward an impressive ethic of care. The world of the Scholomance is a brutal one: you have to keep yourself alive at the cost of others because if you don't, you will die. That is all we can do for each other in the world, to But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and That is what was in your house with you, all your That book contains this line that has stayed with me: There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people toįill their bellies. When I read Last Graduate, I felt that Novik was capable of more because I'd read Spinning Silver now I see that she is up to more, actually something similar to what she was up to in Spinning Silver.
I said that the first book felt like an interesting Harry Potter riff this one moves beyond that to be about something. I don't know if A Deadly Education needed to be exactly the way it was, but The Last Graduate takes an expert turn in plot, world, and character that needed the detailed foundation laid in the first book. Well, this book really does escalate things. I thought A Deadly Education was pretty good, but that it began climaxing at a point where it should have begun escalating. And it's not just that the world doesn't work the way she thought: it means something for what she will have to do.
The rules of how the world does work have been so enmeshed in the mind of the reader, that the idea they could work differently feels as disruptive to you the reader as it does to her, a person who actually lives in this world.
Our protagonist, El, realizes that the world does not function the way she thought it does. Similarly, The Last Graduate has a moment in it that builds on the extensive worldbuilding done here and in the series' first book, A Deadly Education. The book does such a good job with the concept of the dæmons, especially the idea that they are inseparable from their humans, that a mere 150 pages after you learn about this, it viscerally feels like a violation when you discover people out there are separating humans from their dæmons. One of the most effective moments I've ever witnessed in fantasy worldbuilding comes in Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. The Last Graduate: Lesson Two of The Scholomance
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